Rina Tripathi in Conversation with Madhureeta Anand Filmmaker Madhureeta Anand has recently completed a documentary film Laying Janaki to Rest, inspired by the idea of the contemporaneity of Sita. She inquired into the lives of women in various contexts of social existence, and asked them about their understanding of Sita. The resulting film, scripted by Madhureeta, was shown at a festival in Delhi with its focus on gender and sexuality. Rina Tripathi (RT): Why does Sita still have such a strong hold on the Indian psyche? Madhureeta Anand (MA): Sita’s life finds an echo in that of every Indian woman, especially Hindu. This is due to the way we have been conditioned in social life. Intellectually we might be thinking differently, but our emotional and psychological states are conditioned. We know that children learn by example. Similarly, all examples of women around us, our mothers, sisters, aunts, are Sita-esque. When we are presented with real-life situations, we get defensive. The reason for being defensive is that the icon of Sita has been put on a pedestal and we are supposed to follow her example. Sita is a character that none of us can measure up to. Nobody in the world can be like her because she is an imaginary ideal. This is the reason why Indian women constantly live under the impression that they are somehow incomplete. Women feel guilty because they have not been able to become Sita. On the other hand, no man in this country is trying to become Rama, Lakshmana, Krishna or even Dasharatha. Societal pressures thus do not work for men as they do for women. Now for me as a woman, in my life there is a very definite echo. Sita was trying to do her best but she was questioned for no reason at all. She could never prove her ‘innocence’ and therefore ended up alone with her children. Sita always held her head high and never went back. There are some variations of the Ramayana where Rama tries to call Sita back but she refuses. Sita was really on her own, and I related to this part of the Sita mythology. I could relate to it because it is very close to what I went through. I found it so strange that a person like me who has travelled so much, done so much in life, read so much, could relate to Sita easily. It is kind of funny that I do not find echoes of my life in stories of other women, but find an echo in the life of Sita. There are parts of Durga and Draupadi in me but the events of my life were very close to what happened to Sita. I was married to a man who had a deeply suspicious nature and was sure that I was having an affair, which I was not. Instead of trying to express what he was doing to me, I spent years defending myself and saying that I am not like that. Instead of questioning his role in the whole scenario, I spent years trying to prove my chastity. It was absolutely crazy and came to a point that I knew I could not prove anything. I had to seek separation. I am a single mother, and I have a ten-year-old daughter. The problem with the times we live in is that women are becoming more and more successful. Women have to fight hard and that is what they are doing constantly. Men, on the other hand, have been told that it is alright for them to be just men, so that is what they are, just men. RT: How is Sita a contemporary figure? How is women’s success in all fields changing the society? MA: There comes a point when women become so successful that society tries to find reasons to undermine them. Men feel threatened by this success. Even if a woman is not fully successful, it is not bearable to her partner. Our society is in a conundrum. Here, we have two things happening simultaneously. On one hand, you oppress women, whereas on the other hand, our economy needs them to work. Here, very reluctantly society allows women to join the workforce, which has changed things for women. This is a new and strange situation that our society is facing. Men believe that they are superior just by virtue of being men. For women, however, it is a difficult transition, as if a group of people has been pushed to become stronger and now when they have become strong, the consequences of this transition pose a problem. In a patriarchal society that does not want women to become independent but has to relinquish its hold on them due to the demands of the economy, some drastic changes are bound to occur. RT: Do you think there are changes occurring that will challenge our conditioning? MA: There is a dichotomy happening; it’s a tough situation that our society is up against. Society has to take a collective decision on whether it will go on curbing women. Sexually, women have no liberty in this country. In my film I have portrayed three real-life cases. I talked to them and found that the pattern of abandonment was exactly the same in all three. In one case the man wanted dowry, while in the others they wanted money. When they didn’t get it, they started alleging that the women had bad moral characters. In one of the cases, where the woman’s brother used to come, with a box of mithai, to fetch her to her parents’ home, the people at her in-laws started accusing her of having an affair with him. In another case, the same thing thing happened with a caring brother-in-law. Since these women were usually closeted inside the house, they were suspected with the first man who came along. A certain gentleman I met pointed out that the practice of burning brides is very uniquely Indian. We burn our brides in a sort of agni pariksha hangover. It is a direct link—you can shoot them or push them off somewhere, but instead you burn them. Of course, it is also convenient. You can make it look like a suicide. Incidences of women jumping into the fire during johar and sati, they all come from that story of the agni pariksha. RT: Do we see a strong Sita emerging by the end of the mythology? MA: Sita’s strength is her lack of fear while she is going into the forest, which shows her link with nature. A woman who has such a profound link is bound be a very strong woman, but she is not shown as such. Instead, she is portrayed as a weak, subservient creature. We get glimpses of her strength in only a few episodes, like her questioning Rama when he berates her after she is rescued from Ashok Vatika or when she refuses to go through a second agni pariksha. Usually, the qualities of Sita that are brought forth are her loyalty to her husband and her purity as a woman. To me it seems that a particular Sita image has been perpetrated in this country. She is the only goddess who is so strongly identified with the Indian woman’s femininity. Durga typifies the idea of a strong woman, while Draupadi nobody really identifies with. It is Sita who is seen as a role model for women, but she has been made unidimensional. It is time, in my view, to redefine Sita, destroy the image that society has cast her in and resurrect her in the image that we women know ourselves as. We are good spouses, mothers and daughters, but we are not the one-dimensional Sita! RT: What do you think are the views of the younger generation on Sita? What do they think of her; do they accept her as a role model? MA: The educated empowered girls who go to college—the ‘hep’ crowd—say, ‘Look, we don’t think Sita is our role model because she is too idealistic and we will never match up to her. If Sita had to give an agni pariksha, why didn’t Rama also give one because he too stayed away from her for an equal amount of time? Why did she go back to Mother Earth when she had children to look after?’ These are the views today’s girls have. When we speak to the boys, they say that actually it is difficult to find women like Sita these days. They say that it is very difficult for today’s women to be like Sita but none of them say they don’t want someone like Sita even though they themselves are not like Rama. It therefore seems that men are actually yearning for Sita-like women. Where then is the meeting point between the perceptions of men and women? Women are racing ahead while men are just left with the notion of being superior merely because they are male. Where is all this going to lead? RT: Whom will you prefer to portray—Sita as a mother, Sita as a wife or Sita as a daughter? MA: I think I would prefer the role of Sita as a mother, because her role as a mother was the clearest, strongest and most difficult phase of her life. As a wife and as a daughter, she was always under the control of somebody else. There is an engaging description of her interaction with sage Valmiki in the forest. Valmiki tells her to go back to Rama, but Sita says that she would rather live on her own. Then Valmiki asks her to stay with him. She was a queen; she never took anything from Rama. She lived with her sons, and nurtured and educated them. For Indian women, Sita as a mother could become a role model. Being a single mother, I really relate with this facet of Sita. She never felt the need to explain her life to anyone and was at peace with herself, which is really a woman’s supreme strength. RT: Is there something to learn from Sita’s life for contemporary women? MA: There is a lot that one can learn from her life.Though I think that thiere is nothing much to be learnt from Valmiki’s version of Sita. However, there are other versions such as the Adbhut Ramayana, where Sita herself kills Ravana but makes it look as if it was Rama who has killed him. I find this very endearing. When Rama and Sita are together privately, he recognizes who is stronger of the two. People who know this version realize that women struggle with the dilemma of whether they should rise to their full potential or not in a male-dominated society. RT: Does Sita portray the power of the male over the female? MA: Sita lives under the protection of her father first, then abides by her husband’s wishes, and then lives for her sons in the end. In that sense, she is always under the influence of males like the typical Indian woman in a patriarchal society. She is hardly seen as an individual but more as a mother, wife and daughter. I am not sure if she can be a contemporary role model. She should not be contemporary, but the irony is that she is, because how many of us dare to break out of the traditional mould? RT: Does the role reversal take place and men also end up getting exploited and dominated by women? MA: This happens, but the proportion of such men is very small and society always supports men when they complain of harassment. If a woman complains that her husband is being unfaithful, she is ridiculed and told that all men do this and that she would have to accept it. If a woman is unfaithful and the man claims that his ill-treatment of her is due to her adultery, the whole society supports and encourages him. An ideal situation is one where both men and women are treated equally by society. It is not correct to ill-treat a man, a woman, a low-caste or a child for any reason, for that matter. What I want to convey is that the social construct so heavily favours men that no matter how many laws we make, how many seminars we hold, how many books we write, it will continue to be so, not until we change our role models and our icons. Until we redefine the image of Sita, we are going to be stuck in the same social mores forever, because she is the goddess that all Indian women across the board most identify with. The journey portrayed in the Ramayana is actually metaphorical; it is, in fact, a love story. Sita and Rama end up being separated and are never really together. They possibly remain celibates throughout their exile. Sita’s narrative is like a bad Bollywood film! Things keep on getting worse for her, they never get better. She has to go back to Mother Earth in the end; she can’t even live on her own in this world. It is a really sad story and a comment on Indian womanhood. Indian women are in such a pathetic state today, suffering from guilt if they are attractive, if they are unable to produce a male, or if they are half-way successful. The Sita role model comes to the surface even in the case of progressive, educated and empowered people. It is constantly presented, always reminding you that you can never match the high standards set by Sita. RT: The underlying current in the whole story is about sexual fidelity, don’t you think? MA: Ravana lusted after Sita and Rama is shown as a man very much in love with Sita, and yes, the issue is that of sexual fidelity. After my film on Sita was screened, a man asked me whether I was trying to create a division among men and women, trying to create a male versus female paradigm, and someone in the panel answered that empowering women does not mean disempowering men. Another woman came up to me and asked for a copy of the film, saying that she wanted to show it to her husband to prove to him that the Sita whose example he cites was not actually like she has been portrayed in the epic. I had myself been caught up in the quagmire of trying to prove my innocence, trying to prove that I was not having an affair. I wondered at that moment whether that woman could ever develop a frame of mind whereby she could tell her husband, ‘Listen, you are not like Rama, so why do you want me to be like Sita?’ I got an interesting response from a lesbian woman, who wanted to know how Sita was relevant to her situation. Thus, it is obvious that the Sita paradigm evokes a vast range of emotions and thoughts. She symbolizes more than just a myth or a goddess; indeed, she represents an idea. Unfortunately, however, stereotypes about her abound in cinema and on television, which is why I strongly feel that with Sita being such a powerful influence on the Indian psyche, we need to transform the Sita myth and impart modern relevance to her, to ensure the progress of feminism in India. Conversation with Nina Paley Malashri Lal Nina Paley (b. 1968, in the US) is a long-time veteran of syndicated comic strips, having created Fluff (Universal Press Syndicate), The Hots (King Features) and her own alternative weekly Nina’s Adventures. In 1998 she began making independent animated festival films, including the controversial yet popular environmental short film The Stork. In 2002 Nina followed her then husband to Thiruvananthapuram in India’s southern state of Kerala, where she read her first Ramayana. This inspired her first feature Sita Sings the Blues, which she animated and produced single-handedly over the course of five years on a home computer. Presently, Nina teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow. Malashri Lal (ML): Sita Sings the Blues has been immensely successful in both the US and UK. Nina Paley (NP): But it hasn’t been released in either country yet! In fact, it’s having its North American premiere this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. So far, the complete feature has only been seen at the Berlinale in Germany and the NatFilm festival in Denmark. And no, I haven’t made any money yet; I’m still spending my own money to make film prints, do sub-titles, ship things . . . ML: We understand from interviews that your personal experience led to your reading Sita’s story in a contemporary light. How can the film reach out to women in India across cultural differences? NP: That is a good question. I can’t tell you how curious I am to discover how the film will be received in India—or if it will get shown there at all. Some people may love it, some may hate it. Every viewer brings his/her own experience and perspective to a film, and every interpretation is valid, be it critical or adulatory. We can only wait and see. ML: Sita has traditionally been revered as a figure of ideal wifehood, though new and critical opinions are calling attention to the denial of ‘choice’ in several episodes of her life. In particular, the agni pariksha sequence calls for a review in terms of a feminist understanding of woman’s agency and action. Do you think Sita in the Ramayana was a passive person, or do you believe that it was merely a patriarchal interpretation which highlighted the submissive aspects of her character? NP: The latter—I do not see Sita as passive. The agni pariksha I see as a metaphor for grief. I wanted to kill myself when my husband dumped me, and the unbearable pain was like fire—I thought it was going to kill me and I’m still kind of amazed it didn’t. Sita’s walk through fire is actually an active expression of a heartbreak experience. In this way Sita is far more active than most of us. In fact, Sita is a model for expressing what we often repress. She loves Rama actively, without censure or shame or any limits. And when he breaks her heart, she expresses her pain with her whole being. How many of us mere mortals can do that? ML: What remedial measures did you take in your version to emphasize the strength of Sita? NP: I am not trying to take any ‘remedial measures’; I am just showing it like I see it. I think Annette Hanshaw’s voice is the best emphasis of Sita’s strength: strength in vulnerability, honesty and yes, purity. Hanshaw’s voice rings clear as a bell after almost a century, and its sweetness is devastating. Sita’s ferocious love for Rama is an unstoppable force, a true source of power, if not empowerment. At the end, Sita’s own power takes the fore, when she calls on Mother Earth to take her back into her womb. Here she displays supernatural powers exceeding those of any other mortal character, even Rama. But this is all there in the Valmiki text; I am not making it up. ML: Using shadow puppets is another highly effective device as it reminds the viewers of the popularity of the Ramayana in vast areas of Asia. Did the creative and production work involve researchers from south and south-east Asian countries? NP: The only researcher on the production was me! I was also the writer, producer, director, designer and crew. But it’s not hard to find reference to shadow puppets. A friend bought me a few in Indonesia, and I found pictures of shadow puppets from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and India in books and online. ML: I am intrigued by your choice of colours: Sita wears pink, and Rama is painted blue. This is a very elemental colour coding for the male and the female. Rama is described to be in the lineage of Vishnu and blue could be justified from that viewpoint. Sita’s wearing of baby pink from the beginning to the end of her tragic story seems to make an ironic comment on the notion of female innocence as such. Do you agree? What would be your interpretation of the colours you use? NP: Sita is called ‘The Ideal Woman’ and Rama ‘The Ideal Man’. So, in their designs I wanted to emphasize Sita’s female-ness and Rama’s male-ness in every possible way, to a ridiculous extent. In the West, pink is considered a colour for girls and blue for boys, and this did fit in nicely with Rama’s blue visage in many traditional paintings. More than the colours, the shapes emphasize gender. Sita’s hourglass shape is impossible to achieve; if I had made her waist any thinner, I would have had to bisect her. Likewise, I gave Rama enormous biceps and an impossibly broad chest. The characters’ silhouettes unmistakably say ‘female’ and ‘male’. Ideal doesn’t just mean a ‘desirable role model’. It has other meanings, as in ‘Platonic ideal’—an abstract essence. These extreme poles of masculinity and femininity are how I see Rama and Sita, and how I convey them in both the narrative and the art. ML: Sita Sings the Blues blurs the distinction between the tragic story of the epic and the comedy of modern lives, especially of women caught in the binds of marital conventions. NP: To be clear, Sita Sings the Blues isn’t a critique of marriage or sexist social conventions: it is an anguished critique of romantic love itself. I didn’t love my rejecting husband because society told me to. What blew my mind while reading various Ramayanas in the midst of my own break-up was how primal and universal the problems of love are, and have always been. I do not see Sita as a victim of society. She was not ‘forced’ to be loyal to Rama. She could have stayed at the palace during his forest exile; she could have walked away when he rejected her in Lanka (when he declares, ‘You are free to go wherever you want’; he also gives her permission to remarry). It was Sita’s essential nature to love Rama, regardless of what the rest of the society expected of her. At the end, when she finally gives up on him, her life can end. The way I see it, she attains moksha at that point—liberation not only from her congenital love for a man who breaks her heart, but from all of life’s sucker punches. ML: Did the mix of technology that you used offer this contrast better than conventional cinema or theatre? NP: I used animation because I’m an animator. I just wanted to tell this story, using the skills and sensibility I have. ML: In India, some of the Rama Lila performances enacted at Dussehra attempt to impart a contemporary slant to the story but they may not innovate in any extreme form because the context is religious. Do you see your film as rewriting religion or creating a secular text based on religion? Maybe you have another category in mind that you wish to describe? NP: I’m certainly not rewriting religion. I understand that for Hindus, the Ramayana is a religious text, but the Ramayana belongs to hundreds of millions of non-Hindus too, and has for centuries. It belongs to Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia, Buddhists in Thailand and Cambodia, and to everyone in India regardless of religion. My Christian friend in Kerala told me her family always exhorted her to ‘be like Sita!’ The Ramayana was clearly important to her and her family, but was it a religious text for them? I don’t think so. So a secular interpretation of the Ramayana is nothing new at all. I didn’t contrive this story, and I have no agenda in telling it except to express my own heart. Sita Sings the Blues is just my honest telling. It is modern and American because I am modern and American. It is funny and sad because I am funny and sad. It is what it is—I tried to get out of its way and let the story just tell itself. But it told itself through me, and that is why it is such a strange hybrid! Annette Hanshaw (October 18, 1901 – March 13, 1985) was one of the first great female jazz singers.